Search This Blog

THE CHILDREN ARE OK

seriously. The kids are OK! It's hit the news that Bolivia, one of the bastions of Latin American leftism, recently changed its labour laws to permit 10-year-olds to work if self-employed, and 12-year-olds if working as employees of someone else.

Is this wise? Is this not the very height of immorality? Are children not so precious that they must be shielded from the ravages of the labour market? You'd think that would be exactly Evo Morales' line. Perhaps that why the Bolivian President wasn't around when this legislation became law.

The Morales government has always been far less interesting to outsiders than that of the late Hugo Chavez, principally because Morales has tended toward a gentler socialism than his Venezuelan amigo.

Nevertheless, permitting child labour does seem somewhat in keeping with the admissions even of other Socialists, notably David Harvey in A Brief History of Neolibralism - an insipid book, scarcely worth reading but for the observation in its later pages that legislating child labour away mostly just invites drug cartels and pimps to take advantage of desperately poor youths.

That being the case, perhaps removing barriers to entry for youths will actually, on balance, be positive for the kiddies themselves, as they both learn to make a living and avoid the pitfalls of, on the one hand, acting against the law, and being constantly pressured to work in areas that are entirely illegal anyway.

The Bolivian government's goal seems to be the elimination of this kind of child labour over the next decade or so, though I perceive that, in a country that is otherwise regulated to the hilt, development will deliver the people from poverty but slowly, and a few more decades of child labour may yet be needed.

Still, props to the man for recognising a failing policy and reversing it! More, please!

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

~~~

Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.